Thursday, September 29, 2016

Four
Republican state Attorneys General [Mike DeWine is not one of them] are suing to stop the Obama administration
from transferring oversight of the internet to an international body, arguing
the transition would violate the U.S. Constitution.

The lawsuit — filed Wednesday
in a Texas federal court — threatens to throw up a new roadblock to one of the
White House’s top tech priorities, just days before the scheduled Oct. 1
transfer of the internet’s address system is set to take place.

In their lawsuit, the attorneys
general for Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada and Texas contend that the transition,
lacking congressional approval, amounts to an illegal giveaway of U.S.
government property. They also express fear that the proposed new steward of
the system, a nonprofit known as ICANN, would be so unchecked that it could
“effectively enable or prohibit speech on the Internet.”

The four states further contend
that ICANN could revoke the U.S. government’s exclusive use of .gov and .mil, the
domains used by states, federal agencies and the U.S. military for their
websites. And the four attorneys general argue that ICANN’s “current practices
often foster a lack of transparency that, in turn, allows illegal activity to
occur.”

“Trusting authoritarian regimes
to ensure the continued freedom of the internet is lunacy,” said Texas Attorney
General Ken Paxton in a statement. “The president does not have the authority
to simply give away America’s pioneering role in ensuring that the internet
remains a place where free expression can flourish.”

A
couple of days ago, I posted a chart demonstrating the radical agenda of Black Lives Matter as it relates to race riots in Charlotte and elsewhere. It’s an
important subject in this election season, especially since candidate Donald J.
Trump is going where few GOP candidates have gone: into the inner
cities to explore a “new civil rights agenda” with black leaders such as
Pastor Darrell Scott and Sheriff David Clarke.

Thomas
Sowell, an economist and one of my favorite contributors to various blogsites,
had an article yesterday at Town Hall entitled ‘Favors’ to Blacks. His comments are particularly on topic as to
why a “new civil rights agenda” is in Trump’s platform. Here are some extracts:

Back in the 1960s, as large
numbers of black students were entering a certain Ivy League university for the
first time, someone asked a chemistry professor -- off the record -- what his
response to them was. He said, "I give them all A's and B's. To hell with
them."

Since many of those students
were admitted with lower academic qualifications than other students, he knew
that honest grades in a tough subject like chemistry could lead to lots of
failing grades, and that in turn would lead to lots of time-wasting hassles --
not just from the students, but also from the administration.

He was not about to waste time
that he wanted to invest in his professional work in chemistry and the
advancement of his own career. He also knew that his "favor" to black
students in grading was going to do them more harm than good in the long run,
because they wouldn't know what they were supposed to know.

Such cynical calculations were
seldom expressed in so many words. Nor are similar cynical calculations openly
expressed today in politics. But many successful political careers have been
built on giving blacks "favors" that look good on the surface but do
lasting damage in the long run.

One of these "favors"
was the welfare state. A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed
the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of
racial oppression.

In 1960, before this expansion
of the welfare state, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one
parent. By 1985, 67 percent of black children were raised with either one
parent or no parent.

A big "favor" the
Obama administration is offering blacks today is exemption from school behavior
rules that have led to a rate of disciplining of black male students that is
greater than the rate of disciplining of other categories of students.

. . .

But Washington politicians are
on the case. It strengthens the political vision that blacks are besieged by
racist enemies, from which Democrats are their only protection. They give black
youngsters exemptions from behavioral standards, just as the Ivy League
chemistry professor gave them exemption from academic standards.

In both cases, the consequence
-- unspoken today -- is "to hell with them." Kids from homes where
they were not given behavioral standards, who are then not held to behavioral
standards in schools, are on a path that can lead them as adults straight into
prison, or to fatal confrontations with the police.

This is ultimately not a racial
thing. Exactly the same welfare state policies and the same non-judgmental
exemption from behavioral standards in Britain have led to remarkably similar
results among lower-class whites there.

. . .

If a
“new civil rights agenda” honestly confronts such issues and explores real solutions,
I am all for it. Some of those real solutions will involve eliminating
destructive government interference and shrinking the welfare state. Those are
Tea Party values.

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Betsy McCaughey contributed a post-debate essay today to The American Spectator website. The article, “Failure at Foggy Bottom,” examines Hillary’s track
record running the Dept. of State:

Hillary Clinton
boasts that her experience traveling
to 112 countries as secretary of state qualifies her to be president.
Don’t believe it.

At the end of her
taxpayer-funded audition on the world stage, she came home empty-handed, with
no meaningful gains for the United States. Voters are too smart to be wowed
when she rattles off names of Islamic terrorist splinter factions and
third-world capitals.

Evidence shows she
left the State Department in shambles and our nation weaker. If anything, her
record at Foggy Bottom should disqualify her to be president.

. . .

This presidential
race is a contest between a builder and a blabberer. The builder, Donald Trump,
manages 185
major business ventures around the globe. Until 2009, Clinton had never run
anything. Running the State Department was her chance to prove she could do it.
She failed miserably.

What is most disturbing is that behind the pent up rage and thuggish violence, dressed up in the socially-acceptable package of "black lives matter" is the reality that white violence is the last thing blacks should be "protesting."

Powerful graphic. (If you have difficulty embiggening the chart, the category to which the arrow points is "Blacks killed by whites.")

With less than
6 days to go before the government runs out of money, Congress will vote
this week on a stop gap measure that would fund the government through
December.

What is not in
the Continuing Resolution [CR] is far more significant than what it contains.
Not included are any controversial policy riders. Funding the battle [against] the
Zika virus is included, but at reduced levels.

. . .

The fact that
the CR funds the government at levels agreed upon last year is irrelevant.
Those levels are unacceptable because they add tens of billions to the deficit.
The military is upset because the reduced funding agreed to will hamper operations
and readiness.

About the only
people who are truly happy with this CR are the bureaucrats who will once again
be able to expand their power through additional funding.

Friday, September 23, 2016

You see Van Jones all the time on CNN, but some of us still can't get past his role as President Obama's Green Czar. Jones resigned over the Labor Day weekend in 2009 following criticism and outrage over his radical positions. (Here's the archived report on Politico.)

From
cleveland.com today:

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Two
prominent political commentators will take a quick hiatus from cable TV next
week to debate the election at Baldwin Wallace University instead.

Newt Gingrich, the former U.S.
House Speaker who has emerged as a prominent supporter of Republican nominee
Donald Trump, and Van Jones, the former environmental adviser in President
Barack Obama's White House who now supports Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton,
are scheduled to appear at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 29 at BW's Ursprung
Gymnasium, 136 E. Bagley Rd. in Berea.

The two, who previously
co-hosted "Crossfire" on CNN, will discuss the impact Clinton and
Trump's policies could have on Ohio and its economy, according to university
officials.

The university booked the two
to appear last year as part of the BW School of Business Leadership Lecture
Series. It just so happened that both have emerged as prominent voices on this
year's election, particularly Gingrich, who was discussed as a possible
vice-presidential candidate for Trump.

. . .

The university already has
distributed 2,000 tickets — the gymnasium has room for about 1,500 more people.
Tickets are free, but are limited to four per person.

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Kneeling during the national
anthem has taken the sports by storm since San Francisco quarterback Colin
Kaepernick began it during preseason to protest police treatment of black
people. Other NFL players have done it along with high school football players.

But Virginia Tech basketball
coach Buzz Williams will not have that behavior in his house. Instead, he chose
to show his players why we stand for the national anthem. We do it to honor the
men and women who sacrificed so much so we can enjoy our freedom at home.

There’s
a 4½ minute video of coach Williams on the website. Various versions have been up on YouTube for
over a year, but the recent disrespect exhibited by the SF quarterback makes it
timely. The video on the LI website shows over 34 million views! It's inspiring.

So yesterday evening, the 10pm Hannity show was scheduled to
broadcast the town hall taped earlier in the day in Cleveland Heights. Donald Trump
was speaking as the guest of Pastor Darrell Scott, who is a Trump surrogate; Scott is especially eloquent on minorities, inner cities, the media, and related issues. (This blog has posted some of Scott's interview via YouTubes here and here.)

Fox News bumped the Hannity town hall last night. Instead, they went
wall-to-wall with “Fox News Alert” coverage of Charlotte, North
Carolina, with shots of earlier rioting interspersed with current shots of not much going on (the Governor declared a state of emergency at 12:30 am and the violence continued into the night; I don't know if Fox was still bumping regularly scheduled programming).

Is Fox planning to run the Hannity town hall with Trump tonight or over the weekend? The Fox website states only
that “The Hannity town hall event, originally scheduled for Wednesday, did not
air due to breaking news coverage of the protests in Charlotte.” No announcement of re-scheduling.

Sundance recently predicted that as Election Day approaches, and since Hillary’s campaign seems to be cratering, that we will see the media and the Uniparty political class fan the flames of race warfare like we’ve never seen. Maybe Fox’s decision to bump the Trump town hall and
spend the entire hour with footage of Charlotte streets, evidently anticipating more rioting, is a beginning of the
final ugly phase of the presidential campaign season. I don't know, but I can say that I don't see much difference these days between Fox, other cable news, or the networks.

The
Washington Post, no fan of Mr. Trump, published an annotated transcript of the Hannity/Trump town hall
here.

Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite columnists, not the least
because of his ability to explain economics in ways that anyone can understand.
He writes in plain English, marshals his facts, and it’s all but impossible to
find a logic lapse in any of his arguments. While I may disagree with him on this or that, I admire him and respect his opinion. Always. So I am extracting his column from a
recent Front Page column on “Essential
Reads For The 2016 Election:
Books every American should be familiar with before voting this
November”:

If
you are concerned about issues involved when some people want to expand the
welfare state and others want to contract it, then one of the most relevant and
insightful books is "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple. It
was not written this year and is not even about the United States, much less
our current presidential or other candidates.

What
makes "Life at the Bottom" especially relevant and valuable is that
it is about the actual consequences of the welfare state in England — which are
remarkably similar to the consequences in the United States.

Many
Americans may find it easier to think straight about what happens, when it is
in a country where the welfare recipients are overwhelmingly whites, so that
their behavior cannot be explained away by "a legacy of slavery" or
"institutional racism," or other such evasions of facts in the United
States.

As
Dr. Dalrymple says: "It will come as a surprise to American readers,
perhaps, to learn that the majority of the British underclass is white, and
that it demonstrates all the same social pathology as the black underclass in
America — for very similar reasons, of course." That reason is the welfare
state, and the attitudes and behavior it promotes and subsidizes.

Another
and very different example of the welfare state's actual consequences is
"The New Trail of Tears" by Naomi Schaefer Riley. It is a painful but
eye-opening account of life on American Indian reservations.

People
on those reservations have been taken care of by the federal government for
more than a hundred years. They have lived in a welfare state longer than any
other minority in America. What have been the consequences?

One
consequence is that they have lower incomes than any other minority — including
other American Indians, who do not live on reservations, and who are doing far
better on their own.

The
economic plight of people on the reservations is by no means the worst of it.
The social problems are heart-breaking. As just one example, the leading cause
of death, among American Indian boys from 10 to 14 years of age, is suicide.

As
regards black Americans, there is much talk about the role of police. If you
want a book that cuts through the rhetoric and confusion, and deals with hard
facts, then "The War on Cops" by Heather Mac Donald does precisely
that.

On
racial issues in general, the best economic survey is "Race and
Economics" by Professor Walter Williams of George Mason University. Just
the table on page 35, showing unemployment rates among black and white
teenagers, going all the way back to 1948, should demolish all the rhetoric and
spin that tries to conceal the deadly effects of minimum wage laws on
unemployment among black teenagers.

The
rest of Sowell's column is here. The authors cited by Sowell are also regular
contributors to print and online sources. So if book-length discussions are too
time-consuming for a busy schedule, you can access columns by Dalrymple on welfare and povertyhere,
Williams on the consequences of minimum wages here, and McDonald on the war on cops here. And here’s a review of McDonald’s book on
cops.

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Time out for a little humor. Doug Powers (on Michelle Malkin's website) reports the following:

The Post put a
question mark after “style icon” because they didn’t want to be total sycophantic
sellouts.

Maybe they’re
on to something, because I was dressed like this earlier when fixing an
electrical problem (it’s the only jacket with pockets that can hold all my
tools, and the wearable black tape really comes in handy for wire wrapping):

This outfit –and Doug Powers’s editorial comments above – crack me up.
But have you taken note of the stunning matching pants? Meow.

REMINDER: Tune in to Fox News tonight at 10pm for Hannity's Town Hall "Trump Talks Minority Outreach." It was recorded this morning in Cleveland Hts. at Pastor Darrell Scott's church.

A
president may not have to be good with names to oppose [the jihad agenda]
effectively, but he has to grasp the animating ideology, the power relations,
and the goals of the players — and how weakening one by strengthening another
can degrade rather than promote our security.

Donald
Trump does not have a clue about any of this, careening wildly from vows
to stay out of the fray (leaving it in Vladimir Putin’s nefarious hands) to
promises that the earth will be indiscriminately scorched. The threat against
us has metastasized in our eighth year under a president who quite consciously
appeases the enemy. But the remedy is not a president oblivious of the enemy.

I wonder if Mr. McCarthy has
reconsidered his opinion. I’d like to think that back in January, he was towing
the NR anti-Trump line half-heartedly, but maybe he still thinks Trump has no clue.

However, in view of McCarthy’s analysis today of the jihad attacks in New York, New
Jersey, and Minnesota, it would be difficult to square his Never Trump position
with the presidential race. Today, Trump is the candidate speaking in plain
English about the threat of jihad to Americans and about screening those who
would enter the United States from overseas. Here’s McCarthy on the latest spate of jihad attacks on US soil:

In
the all too familiar pattern, things are going boom, Americans are under
attack, and the American political class is already busy playing the “See No
Jihad” minuet.

In
a rational world, where our highest imperative would be to understand the
threat that confronts us rather than to find the least offensive way of
describing it, it would be patently, undeniably obvious that we are targets of
international terrorism fueled by Islamic supremacist ideology. Nevertheless,
the political class can only bring itself to say this kicking and screaming,
and only if there is no other plausible alternative — which basically means a
terrorist caught in the act while wearing an ISIS T-shirt.

.
. .

Here
is reality: The enemy that unifies the terrorist siege against the U.S.,
Israel, and the West is Islamic supremacist ideology, which aims to bring the
world under sharia dominion. This ideology is far more important than ISIS and
al-Qaeda because it is what created ISIS and al-Qaeda. It was the catalyst
before those jihadist organizations existed, and it will be around when they
are gone — for as long as we fail to take it on without apology and discredit
it in the light of day.

The
attacks spurred by this ideology, like those carried out this weekend, are
international terrorist attacks, regardless of whether the operatives who
execute them are affiliated with or inspired by a designated international
terrorist organization. There are no “homegrown” attacks because the ideology
is alien. There are no “lone wolves” because the wolves are part of a huge pack
— a fundamentalist Islamic anti-Western movement that has millions of
adherents, some percentage of which will always be willing to take up arms and
kill for the cause.

Pro-American
Muslims need us to help them discredit the fundamentalists. We cannot do this
without openly acknowledging — as, for example, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah
al-Sisi has courageously done — that the roots of jihadist aggression are
Muslim scriptures. This must not be obscured by political correctness. The
scriptures in question must be acknowledged and reinterpreted in a manner that
confines them to their historic context and nullifies a literal interpretation
of them in modern life.

If
we don’t confront the animating ideology and its stealth supporters with every
bit as much energy as our police pursue the murderous jihadists, we lose.
Winning begins with cashiering political correctness, with speaking openly
about, and understanding, what we are up against.

Saturday, September 17, 2016

Assuming Hillary doesn’t have another collapse or some other
health issue, there will be two candidates at the first Presidential debate
on Sept. 26: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. From The Hill:

The Commission on Presidential
Debates announced on Friday that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and their
running mates are the only candidates who will participate in the upcoming
debates.

This means Trump (R) and
Clinton (D) will take part in the Sept. 26 debate at Hofstra University in New
York and that Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green
Party nominee Jill Stein have not been invited.

The Oct. 4 vice presidential
debate will just include Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence.

Some of the crystal balls got this one wrong. Politico ran a story
on the possibility of third party candidate participation. Treehouse captured text of the recent full-page ad in The New York
Times that gave every appearance of greasing the polling wheels to get Johnson
onto the debate stage. Evidently, it didn’t work.

Anyone
who can stand to watch Fox’s Watter’s World on-the-street interviews with
low-information voters, or those who remember similar candid camera interviews
on Jay Leno’s Tonight show, are probably aghast at the dumbing down of the
American culture, media, and education. We're talking about young adults who do not recognize an image of George Washington and cannot name the sitting Vice President. Who are the young voters who are part of the electorate?

This past week, I came across two
opinion pieces that examined the educational decline in our country. The first
was by Bruce Deitrick Price (K-12: Parent X Takes On Principal Zero) at the American Thinker blog, about a parent who had attempted on numerous occasions to register concerns with the principal
of her daughter’s school:

My complaints were elevated to
the new principal. I met with him at least seven times; several
times I was accompanied by a member of the school board.

Finally the principal,
aggravated and arrogant, told me schools no longer believe in academic
excellence because demanding subjects no longer appeal to the mainstream
student or to his parents.

He proclaimed that his program,
his syllabus, his teachers were all fully in compliance with local, state, and
federal standards, and he wasn't going to change a single thing to accommodate
me or my daughter.

He said proudly he is a
"Progressive," he has a Ph.D., and he had "helped" develop
and design many of those standards, and he believed in them. He said any
kid who wants a higher-level education for a professional career will have to
get it somewhere else.

He was emphatic that neither I
nor the school board member could change anything.

This
parent decided to home-school her daughter. But the principal’s attitude and
his unashamed statement that academic excellence is a thing of the past is more
than a little alarming. The rest of that short report is here.

A
longer analysis of the collapse of America’s educational standards is by a Canadian contributor to PJ Media, David Solway:

What we see today, then,
universities as centers of leftist indoctrination, the shutting down of
intellectual debate (cf. Allan Bloom’s The
Closing of the American Mind), a generation of “snowflake” students who are
preoccupied with frivolities like trigger warnings, microaggresssons,
transgender bathrooms, and “safe spaces” where they will never be exposed to an
unfamiliar or conflicting idea, and the sniveling infantilization of the entire
academic cohort—flows directly from [John] Dewey and his followers.

These pedagogical
dissidents prepared the ground for the subversive agenda of the Frankfurters by
engaging in an act of cerebral softening, that is, promoting the student over
the teacher, the child over the man (or woman), and feeling over thought—hence
the continuing prominence of the “self-esteem” movement that slashed-and-burned
its way through the educational landscape.

Scary stuff. This
is a much longer read and very thought-provoking, but it may be of interest to conservative voters who have an opportunity to discuss the upcoming election with family and friends. Be forewarned:
the essay is rather depressing, but it does a good job of tracing the history
of how we got to where we are and why it's an uphill battle. If you are interested, it’s here.

The key for me when attempting discussions on politics with liberals is that the
facts and logic don’t seem to matter – at least most of the time. It’s all about feel-good
emotions.If you find Mr.
Solway’s observations perceptive, you might also want to take a look at Diana West’s book-length treatment, The Death of the Grown-Up. It’s
available on Kindle and discounted hardcovers (as low as 1¢). It’s a good read
and goes fast.

A few
days ago I posted a link to a think piece entitled The Flight 93 Election, along with a few extracts. The essay,
originally published on The Claremont Review of Books website here,
generated a significant amount of interest in the blogosphere. It also
generated a boatload of responses, much of it critical, to which the author, writing
under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, responded on
Sept-13 here.

Like
everyone else, I am trying to navigate my way through the run-up to the
November election, and I highly recommend both the original think-piece and the
follow-up that responds to specific criticisms. Here are a few extracts from
the Restatement on Flight 93:

Some
also complained about the aptness of the analogy: the plane crashed! Well, yes,
and this one might too. Then again, it might not. It depends in part on what
action the electorate chooses to take. The passengers of Flight 93 roused
themselves. They succeeded insofar as that plane did not hit its intended
target.

The temptation not to rouse oneself in a time of great peril is always
strong. In another respect, the analogy is even more apt. All of the passengers
on Flight 93—and all of the victims at the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon—died owing in part to a disastrously broken immigration system that
didn’t then and still doesn’t serve the interests of the American people. Which
also happens to be the core issue at stake in this election.

.
. .

[another
reason that some conservatives oppose Trump is that] Trump might win. He is not
playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did,
and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can
ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left.

The
professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make
their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept
playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters,
there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would
have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were
effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious
challenge to the administrative state.

.
. .

[T]he
current governing arrangement of the United States is rule by a transnational
managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state. To the extent
that the parties are adversarial at the national level, it is merely to
determine who gets to run the administrative state for four years. Challenging the
administrative state is out of the question [my emphasis]. The Democrats are united on this
point. The Republicans are at least nominally divided. But those nominally
opposed (to the extent that they even understand the problem, which is: not
much) are unwilling or unable to actually do anything about it. Are
challenges to the administrative state allowed only if they are guaranteed to
be ineffectual? If so, the current conservative movement is tailor-made for the
task. Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the
administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.

Trump
is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement.

.
. .

If
Hillary wins, there will still be a country, in the sense of a geographic
territory with a people, a government, and various institutions. Things will
mostly look the same, just as—outwardly—Rome changed little on the ascension of
Augustus. It will not be tyranny or Caesarism—not yet. But it will represent,
in my view, an irreversible triumph for the administrative state. Consider that
no president has been denied reelection since 1992. If we can’t beat the
Democrats now, what makes anyone think we could in 2020, when they will have
all the advantages of incumbency plus four more years of demographic change in
their favor? And if we can’t win in 2016 or 2020, what reason is there to hope
for 2024? Will the electorate be more Republican? More conservative? Will
constitutional norms be stronger?

The
country will go on, but it will not be a constitutional republic. It will be a
blue state on a national scale.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

The annual series of Prom concerts at Royal
Albert Hall in London have traditionally closed with the audience waving flags
and singing along to “Land of Hope and Glory” – lyrics set to the Edward Elgar
march that Americans recognize as “Pomp and Circumstance.” That is the march often
played as the processional at high school graduations (or at least it used to
be in the ancient days of my youth.) This year the YouTube of the September 10,
2016 Last Night of the Proms “Land of Hope and Glory” is particularly
heartening as well as entertaining.

Conducted by Sakari Oramo with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (9 minutes)

Yes, there were flags of the EU
(spoilsports) and if you go through the comments section, you’ll see the
pro-Brexit and anti- Brexit sentiments. But mostly you see Union
Jacks galore inside Royal Albert Hall and at the sing-alongs broadcast from London’s Hyde Park and from Belfast. It was a celebration of British culture,
heritage, and tradition. The Brits were out in force enthusiastically waving
their flag.

Monday, September 12, 2016

I
am assuming that Tea Party people are already up to date on Hillary’s collapse yesterday
in New York, the belated diagnosis of “pneumonia” -- which now seems to be
afflicting her staff and Chuck Schumer as well, the possibility of a DNC fallback plan (see also here), etc. The Power Line blog has a photo essay up on Hillary’s
really bad week, and here are two images: